How good is your company at proving what it is worth?

Some time this week, a deal in your pipeline reaches the point where someone on the buying side asks what your product is actually worth to them.

The answer will come from somewhere. A spreadsheet built on a Friday afternoon. A slide from a deck that has been reused eleven times. A number worked backwards from whatever the customer's finance team needed to see. Or, if you are fortunate, from the one person in the building who is genuinely good at this.

Which of those you get is mostly luck.

It is tempting to call that a sales problem. It is not. That same number passes through a lot of hands. An AE presents it. A solution consultant builds it. A value engineer reworks it, if the company has one. Customer Success inherits it at renewal and has to show it came true. And when it does not hold up, the deal closes on a discount instead, which the CEO reads at the end of the quarter. Every one of those people depends on the number being good. None of them is accountable for whether it was.

Nobody is being careless. You cannot hold someone to a standard that has never been written down. Quantifying what you are worth to a customer, and making that number hold up when somebody pushes on it, is a capability like any other. There is no agreed way to say how good your company is at it.

Everything else gets measured. Win rate, cycle length, retention, ramp time. For this one there is no scale, no stages, nothing to measure yourself against. There is not even a vocabulary for the conversation.

So we built one.

Today we are publishing the valueIQ Value Intelligence Maturity Model™. Five stages, nine dimensions, and a diagnostic any B2B company can run on itself.

We are not the first people to work on this problem. Value management has frameworks of its own, and the good ones will tell you honestly where your organization is strong and where it has gaps. What they will not tell you is where you are. A list of strengths and gaps is an audit. It reports on today. It does not say how far along you are, what the next stage would require of you, or which weakness is setting the ceiling for all the others. That is the gap we built for.

So the stages are cumulative, which means you can say where you stand and what Stage 4 would actually demand. The dimensions are capabilities rather than departments, because none of this sits inside one department, and there are nine of them rather than a handful of functional areas, each with a stated boundary saying what it excludes. It also puts quantification and pricing inside the model rather than beside it. What the nine dimensions measure is whether your organization can define, quantify, communicate, price and prove the economic value it creates for a customer, consistently, and across the whole customer lifecycle rather than only up to the deal closing. That is what decides whether your next deal closes at full price.

Steven Forth brought two decades of pricing and value engagements to the stage definitions. And the model covers ground no framework written five years ago could have covered: machine-readable value models, governed AI agents, and what happens to your pricing when the buyer on the other side is software.

We are giving it away. The full model, the stage-by-stage detail for every dimension, the assessment. Free, with no gate on the diagnostic, and with no stage anywhere in it where you buy software.

A standard that only works for the company publishing it is not a standard. It is marketing.

Maturity models got their start in the mid-1980s, when it became clear that software development was expensive, complicated, and that not all organizations were good at it. The Capability Maturity Model came out of that. Five stages, chaotic to optimizing.

You do not hear much about CMM now. What it gave engineering leaders is still worth having, and it was never the score.

The first thing is a way to say something true out loud. Most companies already know their value practice is uneven. What stops the conversation is that every way of raising it sounds like an accusation. "Our business cases are weak" lands on whoever wrote the last one. "We are a Stage 2 on Business Case Practice and a Stage 1 on Artifacts" lands on nobody, and it is specific enough to act on. A scale turns a personnel conversation into an operating one.

The second is knowing what to fix first. Companies trying to improve this almost always do the wrong thing next. They buy tooling when what is missing is ownership. They hire a value engineer while the artifacts still do not survive the deal, so the new hire's work disappears along with everyone else's. A model that scores dimensions separately tells you which move is available to you, and which one will be wasted.

Value management has never had either of those. It is roughly as immature today as software development was in 1985, and for the same reason. The work is high-stakes, expensive when done badly, and almost entirely dependent on the skill of whichever individual happens to be doing it.

Every rep walks into an executive review with a quantified, inspectable business case. Not a persuasion device pointed at one person, but common ground the buying group argues from rather than around. And not a set of numbers you supplied. The customer's own finance and operational people have been through the assumptions, which is what turns a sales document into a shared business case.

Price is defended with a model, not a discount. Renewal opens from a record connecting what was promised to what was delivered, so the conversation is documentation rather than persuasion. And the question what is this worth, and how do we know? gets answered on any deal, in any quarter, without depending on one person being in the room.

Five stages, Ad Hoc, Repeatable, Defined, Managed, Optimizing, scored across nine dimensions of practice:

Activities · Business Case Practice · Artifacts · Value Data & Proof · Pricing Strategy · Investment · Ownership · Capabilities · Management Systems

The order matters. The first four establish value and prove it. Pricing sits fifth because that is the point at which proven value becomes commercial terms. Set your pricing architecture before you can quantify and prove value, and you are deriving price from an assertion. Capabilities and Management Systems sit last because they are what keep the other seven alive when the people who built them move on.

Most organizations will place between the second and third stage. That is not a criticism, it is where the market is.

And you will not get a single number out of this. That is deliberate. A score would let you average a Stage 1 dimension into a comfortable 3.2, and the average is never the useful finding. The dimension sitting furthest behind is what sets the ceiling for all the others, which is the whole reason to score nine of them separately.

What has changed is that the upper stages are now reachable. Getting there once meant carrying a value function as overhead, which is why so few companies ever did. Value tooling was a privilege of scale. It should be a utility.

The model is published in full and free to download: nine chapters, the five-stage detail for every dimension, and the research behind it. It comes with a self-assessment. Nine questions, one per dimension, about three minutes. It returns a stage for every dimension and names the one sitting furthest behind.

If you are responsible for defining, quantifying, communicating or proving the value your company creates for its customers, we built this for you.

We are excited to put it into the world, and we want your feedback on it. Tell us where it is wrong, where it is thin, and where it does not match what you see inside your own organization. We intend to keep improving it, and the fastest way to do that is to hear from people using it.

We built it to help companies put value work where it has the greatest impact. For most, that is not where the effort is going today.

— Amar Dhaliwal, Co-Founder & CEO, valueIQ

What is the Value Intelligence Maturity Model™?

A five-stage, nine-dimension framework, modelled on the Capability Maturity Model, for assessing how consistently an organization can quantify and prove customer value across the whole customer lifecycle.

Is it free?

Yes. The full model is a free download and the self-assessment runs in your browser with no signup. Nothing you enter is transmitted or stored.

Do I need to be a valueIQ customer to use it?

No. The framework is vendor-neutral. Four of the nine dimensions are organizational, and no tool addresses them.

Where do most companies land?

Between Stage 2 and Stage 3. The useful finding is not the average but the dimension furthest behind, because that is what sets the ceiling for the others.

The valueIQ Value Intelligence Maturity Model™. © 2026 valueIQ. All rights reserved. valueIQ and the valueIQ Value Intelligence Maturity Model are trademarks of ValueIQ Technologies Inc.